This creepy Warner Robins home has scared people for years, but this could be the last

Many hours of work go into the Museum of Aviation’s Nevermore Hills Haunted Trail each year, but it takes no effort to make the house that it features look scary.

It manages that all on its own.

The one-story home is about 2,000 square feet with a vaulted ceiling and a screened front porch. Long vacant, it sits in the woods on the south end of the museum. Walk down the trail that thousands of nervous visitors have trekked in the darkness, and it appears suddenly in the woods, like something out of a nightmare, creepily obscured by trees and vines.

The sight of it evokes the morose opening lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in which the narrator describes coming upon the forbidding home of his friend for the first time.

“I know not how it was,” Poe’s protagonist states, “but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.”

Jenny Maas, director of operations for the Museum of Aviation Foundation, knows the feeling.

“I don’t even like being here during the day,” she said as she gave a tour of the house Tuesday. “It’s really old and really creepy.”

As uninviting as it may look now, it likely was once an idyllic, rural family setting. Robins Air Force Base historian Bill Head said it was the home of the Gentry family that owned a dairy on the property that later became the base. He didn’t know anything for sure about the home beyond that.

Houston County tax records state that the house was built in 1865 and owned by John C. Gentry Jr. The estate of Miriam Gentry sold it to the Museum of Aviation Foundation in 1999.

Maas said haunted trail visitors have told various unconfirmed legends about the home, including that Union soldiers were hanged from a tree behind the house, and they have even pointed out the specific tree. She also has been told that a woman who lived there shot her lover on the front porch.

“Having worked out here in this house and around this house for six years, we have certainly heard a lot of different things,” she said. “It’s an interesting piece of land, that’s for sure.”

Head said he had no reason to believe those stories were true, and he especially didn’t think it likely that any Union soldiers would have been hanged there.

But legends of it being haunted persist. A local group of ghost hunters spent a night at the house a couple of years ago and reported hearing strange noises. One haunted trail volunteer swears he was working alone there at night and saw a woman in a black dress walking around the property.

Visitors will see some pretend graves that have been created for the haunted trail as they walk toward the house, but Maas said there are some actual unmarked graves on the property.

The haunted trail started in 2013, and the next couple of weeks might be the last chance the general public will get to see the house. The museum is ending the haunted trail after this year due to the amount of labor it takes to put on the event, Maas said. Although it has netted as much as $25,000 profit in a year, Maas said it takes 60 or more volunteers each night. With the crowd increasing closer to Halloween, it’s difficult to find enough people to help out.

Another reason is the recent addition of a virtual reality simulator at the museum. That is expected to generate enough revenue to replace the haunted trail income, which goes toward the museum’s educational programs.

However, a couple of military units on base have expressed interest in taking over the haunted trail next year, so it’s possible someone else will do it with the museum’s only role to be allowing use of the property.

But while Maas said the house has been inspected and found to be structurally sound for its use on the haunted trail, it will need some work to save it, and probably soon. There are gaping holes in the roof; sunlight shone through in places as Maas gave a tour of the house. The roof is also why half of the house has been closed off from the tour, which used to go through all of it.

Trees fell during Hurricane Michael, but they managed to miss the house.

Maas said the museum has long-term plans for the property that include additional parking and a hotel. Some people in the community have expressed interest in moving the house to another location and restoring it. Head said he would like to see someone save the house, but he suspects the move alone could be prohibitively expensive.

Chrissy Miner, president of the Museum of Aviation Foundation, did not rule out that the museum could restore the house. But she said at this time there is no money available to do that. She said the best chance for it might be for a historic preservation grant from the state. She envisioned the house as possibly an entrance to a hotel.

About 2,500 people went through the trail last year. The show begins at 8 p.m. each night starting Friday and Saturday, with tours running until 11 p.m. It continues Oct. 26 and 27, with the final show on Halloween, Oct. 31. For more details go to museumofaviation.org.

This story was originally published October 18, 2018 at 4:26 PM.